gateway-discord

README

Bytebot Discord Gateway

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation
  • Prerequisites
  • Docker
  • Docker-Compose
  • Manual
• Usage
  • Configuration
• Contributing
• License
• Acknowledgements

Introduction

A simpler way to write Discord bots.

Bytebot is a message-passing framework designed to make it easier to write bots for multiple platforms. This repository contains the Discord gateway, which allows you to connect to the Discord API present a single interface to your bot while you run as many applications and services as you like, in any language, without having to worry much about the underlying platform. This particular repository is the gateway for Discord.

This tool is not a complete working bot on its own. The gateway is responsible for authenticating and managing a connection to Discord while passing messages to and from your bot. You will need to write your own bot to take advantage of this gateway. You can see an example of a bot written in Go here.

Because messages are JSON-encoded, you can write your bot in any language you like. You can even write multiple bots in different languages and run them all at the same time. You can also run multiple instances of the same bot, each with a different configuration, if you like. The only requirement is that your bot can read and write JSON-encoded messages to standard input and output.

Here is an example of a python implementation of a bot that responds to the ping command with pong: bytebot-chat/examples/py-pingpong

Installation

Prerequisites

• Redis server (for pub/sub)
• Docker (optional, required for docker or docker-compose)
• Golang (optional, required for building from source)
• A Discord bot token (see here for more info)

Docker

The easiest way to get started is to use the Docker image. You can find the image on the Github Container Registry here. It is strongly recommended that you pull either the main or edge tag, as these are the most up-to-date versions of the gateway. Semver tags are only updated when a new release is made but are not guaranteed to be the most up-to-date version. However, they are guaranteed to be more stable.

Docker Compose

The easiest way to get started for development or just poking around is to use the provided example docker-compose file. This file will start the gateway and a Redis server used for pub/sub and is required for the gateway to function. You will also need to provide your Discord bot token in the args section of the gateway service in the docker-compose-example.yml file. You can see your existing apps and retrieve your Discord bot token here here.

1. Copy the docker-compose-example.yml file to docker-compose.yml
2. Edit the docker-compose.yml file and replace the YOUR_DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN placeholder with your Discord bot token
3. Run docker-compose up -d to start the gateway and Redis server.

From this point you can connect to the redis pubsub to watch for messages from the gateway or connect an app. Try running one of the apps in examples/ to see how it works.

Manual

If you would like to install the gateway manually, you can do so by cloning this repository and running go build in the root directory. You will need to have Go installed on your system. You can find instructions for installing Go here.

You may also install the gateway using go get:

go get github.com/bytebot-chat/gateway-discord

To install a specific version, you can use the @ symbol to specify a version:

go get github.com/bytebot-chat/gateway-discord@v0.1.0

Usage

Configuration

The gateway can currently only be configured by CLI flags. The following table shows the available configuration options:

Flag	Description	Default
redis	The address of the Redis server	localhost:6379
rpass	The password for the Redis server	""
token	The Discord bot token	""
id	The ID of the Discord bot	""
inbound	The channel to listen for inbound messages on	discord-inbound
outbound	The channel to publish outbound messages to	discord-outbound
verbose	Whether to print verbose logs	false

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to this project, please see the contributing guidelines.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.

Acknowledgements

• @m-242 and @parsec for endless code review, suggestions, and tolerating me blowing up their Discord servers with test messages.
• @drewpearce for early iterations and inspiration for the project from a prior project, Legobot/Legobot.
• Several unnamed friends for their adversarial testing and feedback.